2. Place water and butter in a pot and bring to a simmer. Add flour and cocoa powder and cook while stirring until it forms a ball. Add the eggs one at a time and beat vigorously and mix until mixture is glossy and comes together.

3. Place dough in piping bag and pipe out small round circles onto baking paper. Bake for about 15-20 minutes or until dry. Leave to cool.

6.Pipe melted chocolate onto wax paper following the prepared template. Sequence is displayed in the diagrams on the left. You can watch my chocolate bat tutorial for more information regarding piping chocolate and releasing the pieces from the paper.

7. Assemble by cutting small slits into the profiterole and gently easing the chocolate pieces into the slots.

That’s pretty much it! It’s actually not that difficult, just a little fiddly though due to the delicate nature of the chocolate pieces. Below is my sketch for the project. In regards to the styling – I didn’t do much. It isn’t autumn in Australia at the moment so autumn props such as acorns and pine cones etc are not available at the moment unfortunately.

Below is my rough sketch – originally i was going to do a huge one made out of Hershey’s Kisses as well but decided against it due to the sheer amount of chocolate I would have to consume. Might be cool for one of you guys to make it instead though!

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Honey and camomile – my new bedtime beverage before I drift off to sleep on my duck down pillows, which are incidentally my favourite kind of pillow, regardless of how unhygienic and allergy causing it supposedly is.

1. Preheat oven to 160 Celcius (fan forced). Mix all the cupcake ingredients together and beat with an electric mixer for about 5 minutes or until light. Pour into a piping bag and pipe into cupcake liners for the neatest result. Bake for 20 minutes or until cake springs back when lightly pressed.

2. Whip egg white into soft peak stage in an electric mixer. Meanwhile, heat sugar and water to 121 Celcius. Pour sugar mix into egg white while mixer is running at low speed and then turn up to high speed. Continue to whip for another 5 minutes or until cool.

3. To decorate, watch the video tutorial I made here.

If you wanted to know what my photography set up was, here it is! Just the usual settings – 60mm 2.8f shot with a Canon 7D and edited with Lightroom 4.

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I thought I’d do something simple and fun this Halloween. Say hello to my chocolate bats! The process is fairly straightforward – pretty much the same method as the chocolate butterflies that I have made in the past with a different template and some flower wire. Also, the eyes of the bats are drawn in with toothpicks dipped in edible gold dust and vodka. If you’re desperate for a template – any template – to get started now, below is a scanned sheet of my roughly sketched bats and tree stump. I will eventually attempt to make a proper template but for now this will just have to do, internet people! I also tried out a new chocolate cake recipe which was amazing. The cake turned out extremely moist and dense with no grief in regards to technique or complex ingredients. Recipe from here. In terms of photography, I set up a black board on the dining table as below and took the photograph with a 60mm f2.8 lens. I hope you guys enjoyed this little project – I had fun making it. It’s been a while since I did anything fancy.

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I had an abundance of dried dates leftover from baking some sticky date puddings. After an extensive amount of Pinterest-ing and Google-ing, I decided to give chicken tagine a go with a few modifications of my own based on what I had available in my pantry.

Yes, this blog tends to be leaning on the dessert side but I thought I’d branch out today.

I had this spice mix in the pantry but you can use any Moroccan spice mix you can get your hands on with this recipe.